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Girl Walks Out of a Bar (Paperback) (Lisa F. Smith)

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When I walked out my apartment door and heard it shut behind me, something suddenly felt wrong, unusually wrong. Anxiety overwhelmed me. I felt sicker than usual. My head was heavier and murkier, too. The shakes were deeper. I could feel them in my guts and my bones. I even seemed to hate myself more than usual . . . I’m going to die, I thought. This life is going to kill me, and maybe today. I don’t want to die. When I raised my hand to press the down button for the elevator, I stopped. Every inch of my body was leaking a strange, cold sweat. A voice screamed in my brain, “GET HELP!”

Lisa Smith was a bright, young lawyer at a prestigious firm in NYC in the early nineties when alcoholism started to take over her life. What was once a way of clearing away the cloud of negativity engulfing her quickly became a means of coping with the anxiety and stress of an impossible workload. Ultimately it became a numbing agent, a way to deal with hating herself.

Girl Walks Out of a Bar explores Smith’s formative years, the decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recovery. Every instance of childhood shame, inadequacy, and depression conspires to nourish an environment ripe for addiction to flourish. Girl Walks Out of a Bar is a candid portrait of alcoholism through the lens of gritty New York realism. Beneath the façade of success lies the reality of addiction.